March 01, 2011

Interesting Posts Today

The blogging muse went on vacation and did not tell me. So today's post is a summary of some very interesting articles from this morning's reading.

Fred Wilson, legendary NYC VC, started a huge debate on the internet here on the role of marketing in early stage companies. Basically all the VCs lined up with Fred and the marketing mavens all took the opposite view. Fred basically argued for a focus on sales with support from internally generated PR and social media. What the marketing mavens said was largely wrong or confusing. Bottom line do not think about "marketing" in the classic sense and focus on very capital efficient approaches to get customers. One of the more interesting articles in the debate came from the Equity Kicker.

Another interesting article came from an old Tech Crunch post on the pitch deck for a VC or angel. Tim Young reveals the secrets that he used successfully to raise $10 million for two startups in the same year. He uses a 5 slide deck. I love the simplicity, clarity and elegance of his sample deck. I think I found this article through an answer on Quora.

I cannot believe I am going to mention a story about Microsoft technology. Please do not tell anybody. This story describes how Microsoft is developing technology where the human body is the interface to the computer. No mouse, no keyboard. Just hit your arm with your hand in different places and the computer correctly does what you want. And you thought the iPad was cool. Interface to the computer is a big new frontier.

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Interesting Posts Today

The blogging muse went on vacation and did not tell me. So today's post is a summary of some very interesting articles from this morning's reading.

Fred Wilson, legendary NYC VC, started a huge debate on the internet here on the role of marketing in early stage companies. Basically all the VCs lined up with Fred and the marketing mavens all took the opposite view. Fred basically argued for a focus on sales with support from internally generated PR and social media. What the marketing mavens said was largely wrong or confusing. Bottom line do not think about "marketing" in the classic sense and focus on very capital efficient approaches to get customers. One of the more interesting articles in the debate came from the Equity Kicker.

Another interesting article came from an old Tech Crunch post on the pitch deck for a VC or angel. Tim Young reveals the secrets that he used successfully to raise $10 million for two startups in the same year. He uses a 5 slide deck. I love the simplicity, clarity and elegance of his sample deck. I think I found this article through an answer on Quora.

I cannot believe I am going to mention a story about Microsoft technology. Please do not tell anybody. This story describes how Microsoft is developing technology where the human body is the interface to the computer. No mouse, no keyboard. Just hit your arm with your hand in different places and the computer correctly does what you want. And you thought the iPad was cool. Interface to the computer is a big new frontier.